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Murder at the Copper Beech: A 1920s Historical Cozy Mystery
Paperback
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 386
Weight: 1.02
Height: 0.96 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A man everybody loved. A garden everybody walked past. And nineteen years of small, patient theft nobody ever thought to look for.
Tanglewick in October is beech woods turning copper, woodsmoke in the lane, and apples piling up in the church porch. Lady Veronica Whitcombe has an estate to run, a committee seat she has never taken seriously, and a letter from the old curator of the village museum asking her to come early to the Subscription Evening. There is something he would rather show her than write down.
She arrives half an hour late. Her dog finds him under the copper beech.
The county inspector reads a forced window and a missing tray and calls it a robbery interrupted. Veronica reads paper, ink, and letterforms the way other people read weather, and what she reads in the accession registers is worse: one hand on the disposal slips for nineteen years, a Roman coin that weighs four grams too little, and a clause in a 1905 agreement that nobody in this parish has ever obeyed.
Everybody on her list is respectable. The librarian who lied about the hour she left. The Cheltenham dealer who handled every sale. The airman with no alibi and an unexplained legacy. The mason who swore the tree would come down over somebody's dead body. The schoolmistress burning papers in her grate before it was light. And the chairwoman of the committee, magnificently upright, who insists loudest on calling the police and keeps telling Veronica, in the kindest voice imaginable, to stop.
Veronica gets two of them badly wrong before she gets one of them right. By then somebody has been through the museum with a key, and the one document that could prove anything has gone out of a window in a tray.
A fair-play English village mystery in the golden age tradition: warm, autumnal, gently funny, with tea and damson jam and an opinionated reading-room cat.
Read Murder at the Copper Beech, and spend an English autumn in Tanglewick.
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